Fernando José Corbató

Fernando José Corbató, (born July 1, 1926, Oakland, Calif., U.S.), American physicist and computer scientist and winner of the 1990 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “pioneering work organizing the concepts and leading the development of the general-purpose, large-scale, time-sharing and resource-sharing computer systems, CTSS and Multics.”

Corbató received a bachelor’s degree (1950) in physics from the California Institute of Technology and a doctorate (1956) in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After finishing his studies, Corbató joined MIT’s Computation Center (1956–66), and he held a professorship at the school from 1962 until his retirement in 1996, at which time he was the Ford Professor of Engineering.

Corbató was a founding member of Project Mac, which was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create a complete time-sharing system. The project built on the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), software that Corbató had created in 1961 at MIT. Project Mac developed the necessary hardware to implement CTSS. This time-sharing system went online in 1963 and was used at many locations around the world until newer hardware designs arrived in 2000. Corbató’s book The Compatible Time-Sharing System: A Programmer’s Guide (1963) is a classic.